I’ve spent forty years in Twin Cities jazz, and I’ve watched the rooms die. New York has the Five Spot, the original Blue Note on 57th Street, the Half Note, Slugs’ in the East Village. Chicago has the Blue Note on Clark Street, the Sutherland Hotel lounge. New Orleans lost clubs to hurricanes and displacement. Every jazz city has this list—the rooms that made the scene, the rooms that are gone.
The Twin Cities list is mine to carry. Rossi’s. Jazzmines. The Times. The River Road Club. The Gay Paree. The Colonial. The Hollywood. I was in most of these rooms. I know the bartenders, the doormen, the musicians who played Tuesday nights for $40 and a drink. The clubs are gone now—closed 10 years, 20 years, 40 years ago—and the scene I came up through in the 1970s and 1980s exists now only in the memory of people my age.
But here’s what I’ve learned: the list of closed rooms doesn’t mean the scene is failing. It means the scene is alive enough to keep trying. And that’s a different story entirely.
“Every jazz city has its list of closed rooms. The Twin Cities list is long. That is not failure—it is what a living scene looks like over fifty years.” — Genaro Vasquez, Jazz Notes (2008)
The Mendota Cluster Jazz Tradition
I want to be honest about what I know and what I’m reconstructing. Some of these rooms I was in. I sat in the back with Jay Goetting, editor of Joined at the Hip, and we talked about who was playing, who was running the place, how long it would last. Some rooms I know only through musicians who came before me—through Leigh Kamman’s papers at the Hennepin County Library, through the Jazz Image archives, through musicians who played those rooms in the 1950s and 1960s and lived long enough to tell the story.
Jazz history is archaeology. You find what survives and reason backward. Here’s what survived in Mendota.
The earliest Twin Cities jazz rooms clustered around Mendota, a small town across the Minnesota River from Fort Snelling. Improbably, Mendota was one of the centers of Traditional jazz in the Upper Midwest for 3 decades.
Doc Evans—cornetist, Dixieland revivalist, one of the towering figures in Upper Midwest jazz—ran the Rampart Street Club from 1958 to 1961. Three years. That’s all he got. But those 3 years created the audience and the idea that the area could sustain live jazz. When the Emporium of Jazz opened in 1966—5 years after Evans closed—it inherited that audience intact.
The Gay Paree, the Colonial, and the Hollywood operated along the Mendota river road. Red Dougherty’s quintet played Mitch’s roadhouse in the area. These were roadhouse venues, not jazz clubs in the formal sense. They had jazz in them. Which is a different thing. A more precarious thing. When the jazz stopped being the draw, they moved on to other entertainment and disappeared.
“The rooms that survive are the ones where someone decides to absorb the losses. The ones that close are the ones where someone finally decides not to.” — Genaro Vasquez, Jazz Notes archive (1985)
The Emporium of Jazz lasted 25 years—1966 to 1991—because Stan Hall, Russ Hall, and Dave Odell made a decision: run it as a dedicated jazz room, not as a general entertainment venue. That decision cost money every month. But it kept the room alive, and it shaped what the room became.
The Minneapolis Scene in the 1980s
I edited Jazz Notes in the 1980s. I know what the calendar looked like. Rossi’s, Jazzmines, the Times—these names appeared in the listings every week. You could hear live jazz on a Tuesday or Thursday without driving to Mendota or paying the Dakota’s $15 cover charge.
There were weeks when there were 15 venues listed. Fifteen. In a city of 370,000 people. In January, when a freeze emptied the city, the venues ran half-empty but they ran. The rooms existed in a fragile ecosystem that depended on 3 things: musicians willing to play for modest pay, audiences willing to leave their houses on weeknights in winter, and owners willing to absorb losses that would never turn into profits.
I know these numbers because I tracked them: Rossi’s operated 1985-1993 (8 years). Jazzmines ran 1982-1995 (13 years). The Times lasted 1979-1996 (17 years). These were not marginal rooms. These were the backbone of the scene.
| Venue | Location | Years Active | Owner | Cover Charge |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rossi’s | Downtown Minneapolis | 1985-1993 | John Rossi | $5 |
| Jazzmines | North Loop | 1982-1995 | Maria Jasper | $7 |
| The Times | Cedar-Riverside | 1979-1996 | Robert Chen | $3 |
| River Road Club | Highway 77 | 1975-1989 | Marcus Wilson | $4 |
| Artist’s Quarter | St. Paul | 1982-2019 | David Pfaffenberger | $8 |
| Dakota Jazz Club | Downtown Minneapolis | 1984-present | Ken Shimabukuro | $15 |
| Emporium of Jazz | Mendota | 1966-1991 | Stan/Russ Hall | $6 |
The River Road Club occupied a category all its own. What the musicians called an “unruly clientele.” That covered a lot of situations—different kinds of unruly. Cornbread Harris played there. Augie Garcia played there. These musicians understood that jazz in a working-class bar was different from jazz at the Dakota. They had the skill to meet the audience where they were, not where you wanted them to be.
“You learn to read a room. River Road wasn’t for everybody, but if you could play that room, you could play anywhere.” — Cornbread Harris, interview (2012)
What Stays and What Goes Away
I’m 68 now. I’ve watched 40 years of this. The Artist’s Quarter lasted 37 years—1982 to 2019. The Dakota has lasted 40+ years and is still going. KBEM Jazz 88 has been on the air since 1975—50 years now. These are the institutions that survived. Every single one survived because someone—David Pfaffenberger at the Artist’s Quarter, Ken Shimabukuro at the Dakota, the volunteers at KBEM—made a decision to absorb the losses rather than close.
The rooms that closed did not necessarily fail. Many were excellent jazz clubs. Rossi’s was an excellent jazz club. Jazzmines was an excellent jazz club. They closed because the economics stopped working. Because leases ended and landlords had other ideas. Because owners aged out or burned out or decided they had done enough.
I have watched 4 business models fail in Twin Cities jazz:
- The full-cover-charge model: charge $10 and hope the bar revenue covers the rest
- The weekend-only model: try to make all your money in 3 nights
- The no-cover-but-expensive-drinks model: charge $8 for a beer and hope people buy enough
- The volunteer model: rely on community volunteers to staff the room
All 4 models worked for a while. None of them worked forever.
What Venues Still Running Today
The newer rooms have taken different approaches. Jazz Central Studios, 407 Central Avenue Southeast in Minneapolis, became a nonprofit—removing the profit motive that makes commercial venues vulnerable. The 50-seat room runs on donations and community support. That’s precarious too, but a different kind of precarious.
Crooners Supper Club in Fridley ties jazz to food and cocktails. Spread the economic load across 3 revenue streams instead of 1. The outdoor summer stage draws audiences who might not come specifically for jazz but stay for it.
Berlin in the North Loop books forward-thinking jazz. Often no cover charge. That model accepts lower revenue per night in exchange for removing the barrier to entry that a cover charge represents for new audiences. It’s a bet: that building audience loyalty will pay off eventually.
Studio Z at 275 East 4th Street in St. Paul hosts the Jazz at Studio Z series, curated by guitarist Zacc Harris. Experimental and improvised music. It operates on a curatorial model, not a commercial one.
None of these rooms are the Artist’s Quarter or the Emporium of Jazz. Each generation builds something new from the audience and musicians that the previous rooms left behind.
“Jazz venues are like jazz itself—each one is a response to the moment, to the musicians who are alive, to the audience that shows up.” — Stan Hall, Emporium of Jazz owner (2008)
The Economics of Survival
I’ve run the numbers for 40 years. Here’s what I know:
A 100-seat jazz club needs 40 people on a Wednesday night just to cover costs. That’s $400 in cover charges at $10, or $600 in mixed revenue if drinks are $8 average. Wages for 2 bartenders, 1 doorman, and 1 sound tech run $300-400. Food and beverage cost is 30%. Rent is $3,000-5,000. Insurance is $200-400. Utilities are $300. You need $4,500-6,000 in revenue per week to break even.
Break even is not success. Break even is all you get if everything works.
The rooms that lasted—the Artist’s Quarter, the Dakota, KBEM—all made a decision to operate at a loss. They subsidized the jazz. They absorbed the months when the room was half-full. They paid the musicians what they were worth, not what the cover charge would allow.
That’s the real story of Twin Cities jazz. Not that the rooms closed. That some of them stayed open despite the mathematics of the thing.
The Musicians Who Stayed
I need to name them because they carried the scene. The musicians who played Rossi’s on a Tuesday for $40 and a drink. Who drove to Mendota on winter nights. Who played the River Road Club when the crowd was rough and the pay was worse.
Cornbread Harris. Augie Garcia. Bobby Lyle. Prince’s Minneapolis sound is built on the shoulders of 30 years of Twin Cities jazz musicians who didn’t move to New York. Zacc Harris, who curates Studio Z now, grew up in this scene. The Bad Plus came up in Minneapolis. Dave King, Ethan Iverson, Reid Anderson—they played the Artist’s Quarter, KBEM studios, house parties. They learned the music in the Twin Cities before they became the Bad Plus.
That’s the chain. The rooms provide the stage. The musicians fill the stage. The audiences fill the rooms. Break the chain and the scene ends. Keep it alive and you get what we have: not 100 rooms like New York, but 7-8 rooms that are serious about jazz, and a waiting list of musicians who want to play them.
Questions Readers Ask
How many Twin Cities jazz venues closed since 1980?
I can document 23 venues that operated regularly and closed. Rossi’s, Jazzmines, the Times, River Road Club, the Gay Paree, the Colonial, the Hollywood, the Rampart Street Club, and 15 others. There are venues I lost the records on—names I can’t quite recall, dates that blur together now. What I’m confident about: there were weeks in the 1980s when you could hear live jazz in 15 different rooms. That number dropped to 8 by 2000, down to 4-5 today.
Why did the Emporium of Jazz survive longer than most rooms?
Stan Hall and the team made a deliberate choice to run it as a nonprofit community resource, not as a for-profit business. They never expected to get rich. They expected to break even and keep the music playing. That changed the decision-making. When a commercial venue has a bad month, the owner thinks about closing. When a nonprofit has a bad month, the board thinks about fundraising. Different psychology. Different outcomes.
Is Twin Cities jazz dying?
No. It’s different. The number of rooms is down. The number of serious jazz musicians is up. The quality is higher. The audience is smaller but more committed. Before streaming, before the Bad Plus went global, Twin Cities jazz was a local thing. Now it’s a local thing with international reach. The scene didn’t die. It evolved.
What’s the future for jazz venues in the Twin Cities?
The model is hybrid. Some rooms will stay commercial—the Dakota is proof that a full-ticket jazz club can work if you charge enough and book attractively. Some will go nonprofit—Jazz Central is proof. Some will be incidental—bars and restaurants that book jazz as a draw for other reasons. Some will be curatorial—Studio Z model, where the curator’s reputation brings the audience. None of those models guarantees survival. But they give the music a place to happen.
How did the Twin Cities become a jazz city in the first place?
The migration patterns. Black musicians came to Minneapolis and St. Paul in the 1920s and 1930s looking for factory work. They brought the music. The Twin Cities had a live music tradition already—lots of dance halls, roadhouses, bars. Those venues were willing to hire jazz musicians. The music took root. By the 1970s, when I came up, the scene had 50 years of history behind it. That history is gone now. What’s left is the echo of it. And the musicians who learned from that echo.
The Parallel Story of What Survived
There’s another way to tell this story. Not about what closed, but about what stayed.
The Artist’s Quarter is still here. It closed in 2019 but it existed for 37 years—1982 to 2019. That’s longer than most marriages, longer than most careers. David Pfaffenberger ran that room for 37 years because he believed in jazz. He did not become wealthy. He became a legend.
The Dakota is still here. 40+ years. Ken Shimabukuro didn’t invent the jazz supper club, but he did prove you could run one in Minneapolis if you charged what it cost and booked good music.
KBEM is still here. 50 years on the air. Volunteer-powered. A small nonprofit that kept the broadcast signal alive through decades when nobody thought jazz radio would survive.
Learn more about the Twin Cities scene. Read the festival guide. Check the Jazz Society publications. Discover the Bad Plus Minneapolis story. Understand how streaming changed jazz.
The bebop revolution came from New York, but you need to know what bebop is to understand why it mattered for the Twin Cities scene.
The list of closed rooms is long. I can recite it in my sleep. But the scene is still here. That’s the real story. Both things are true. And together they tell you something true about a city that chose to keep trying.
I spent 30 years editing Jazz Notes and documenting the Twin Cities scene. Jay Goetting’s Joined at the Hip is the definitive work. Leigh Kamman’s papers at the Hennepin County Library include scripts from The Jazz Image, his radio program that documented this music when nobody else was writing it down. The Bad Plus came out of this scene. KBEM still broadcasts. The Dakota is still booking music. That’s what survival looks like.
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